


All the Ways We Learn of Love

by tsukara (AndThenTheresAnne)



Category: Deathless - Catherynne M. Valente
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 13:47:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13055205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndThenTheresAnne/pseuds/tsukara
Summary: Walking your story into the world and how you live after; with difficulty and with grief.





	All the Ways We Learn of Love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Alasse_Irena](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alasse_Irena/gifts).



> I have learned how faces fall to bone  
> how under the eyelids terror lurks,  
> how suffering inscribes on cheeks  
> the hard lines of its cuneiform texts,  
> how glossy black or ash-fair locks  
> turn overnight to tarnished silver,  
> how smiles fade on submissive lips,  
> and fear quavers in a dry titter.  
> \- "To Death", Anna Akhmatova

 

 _The sand as white_  
_as old bones, the pine trees_  
_strangely red where the sun comes down._  
_I cannot say if it is our love,_  
_or the day, that is ending._

-

Like a record skipping a groove, her feet are on another path, toward a house with a square front door and windows where the light streams in, dreamlike in its simplicity, its bright yellow paint standing out like a wildflower in a field. Instinct drives her more than anything at the moment, propels her to the door, her hand to the wood, Marya's knees to bend. In a whirl like growing larger from behind the stove her stomach sinks and she realizes. She has timed it wrong , so completely wrong, walking here, pulling the pins from her braids and her black curls falling, like oil, like sin, more of a uniform than any provided to her by men, or gods, or those who would pretend to either. However... the house where you were never wanted is a different creature from the house where you were missed, where someone had the will to miss you and to want you.

There is Yelena, the one who lives here and now and loves him, taking off her coat, unpinning her own golden hair--like sunlight on wheat--from her head. Marya looks up from where she is kneeling on her one bad knee (the one that went out in that first battle for Skorohodnaya Road) and sees everything that a Koschei or an Ivan might see in her, with her parted lips and sweet swell of hips and her terrible amber eyes shining with more curiosity that a baby hedgehog ever had. A smile, the edge of confusion and yet (and yet).

"Yelena." The word falls out of her mouth almost unbidden, like a prayer or a plea. Marya had never wanted to be one of them, these blessed girls, with their weaving and their innocence in a way that she had not had since the day she saw that first bird fall out of the tree and strike the ground and bounce up to become a husband, but not for her, never for her. She had wanted to help, to rescue, maybe to recuse herself from a responsibility that was never her own.

There is a moment where she, Yelena, the darling girl of fables, looks upon her dark mirror and knows her for a reflection of herself, and then the moment is past, because these things cannot survive in the sunlight of the world where all is supposed to be equal. It is gone as swiftly as it came into that dusty, suspended afternoon, and the Yelena speaks again. "Officer? Can I help you?"

It is the tremolo of fear, so very well hidden as it is, that propels Marya's aching joints. When did she get so old that rising to her feet and sweeping her arms into a proper position was so hard as getting a gun to not fire when it wanted? A nod of the head, formalities and proprieties. "Comrade Yelena--" The next words stick in her throat. She cannot, she will not ask after the one to whom death should never have come. Not in this way, the beggar at the door, when he never saw her bounce up with plummage blazing or dark.

"You... are very orderly and prompt," Marya finishes, the paltry compliment ashes on her lips. She licks them, shakes her head, tucks the arm into her uniform.

Lebedeva would tease her, and Naganya would offer the suggestions she thought most helpful and even if they were here Marya would do none of them because the illusion was so fragile she was worried it might break at any second. Was worried that she might already have broken it by trying to walk in a groove in the world that belonged to another.

The Yelena's face grows more and more concerned at this stranger-officer at her door and finally, finally, a voice calls from within and Marya nods, and flees, and closes her ears--but too late, for there is his voice, because it was always his voice, asking where his beloved is, what she is doing, and whether or not she is coming to their bed.

Marya can see now why Koschei would choose a Yelena, or even a Vasilisa, and why he would be rid of them--or they of him--in the end. Her face is like a blushing apple, sweeter than one could have supposed, hair like wheat, lips like the sweetest meats in ration-time. Marya doesn't know but she can guess that her breasts would be like pomegranates, full and beaded, that the sounds she would make would have just enough honey and just enough bite to attract any chyerti, even if--especially if--she did not know her own power.

Marya Morevna walks back up the dusty street and tries not to ponder the unraveling of time and sense and Ushankas and Yelenas. She does not ponder and she points her feet to the next place that the story wants to take her.

\--

 _You thought I was that type:_  
_That you could forget me,_  
_And that I'd plead and weep_  
_And throw myself under the hooves of a bay mare..._

-

That was the thing about Ivans--There would always be one, just like there would always be an Yelena, and an old woman with her soup pot and a firebird on high, somewhere, somewhere, even if one could not see it clear in the country of the dead. They had walked themselves into the world by complete accident, they must have, Marya thought, footsteps in the dust. And then they just kept stumbling their way back into it blindly, like old boots and old floors.

A sergeant, a lawman, the _uchastkovyi militsioner,_ a keeper of what little peace might be found here among the difficulty and grief. Just as golden-haired as ever, but much older, wasn't he? The settled roundness of the sort of man who took just enough, just enough, to get himself through the cold long winters so that he could see the rest of them through it too. Not cruel, ah, no, never that, but the sort who would share his wine with his friends, but never think of giving it to the poorest in the place who scraped for their wheat and roots. A privilege was earned, after all, not given. To each what they had worked for, yes?

That was just the way of things.

Marya sighed against the doorway, wishing more than ever she could dissipate into thread and memory. Memory was a kind of weaving, right? And with all those Yelenas free now, one certainly needed idle hands to work to keep the pattern. Stepping inside she breathed in the paper paste, the long-dried ink, met the gazes of the happy paper workers, hand in hand, arm in arm, happy on their farms and in their life and, Marya thought, if only it could stay like that, through and through, But that is not how any of us live, is it?

He stood when he saw the uniform, an automatic response. "Can I help you... comrade?" Of course Marya noticed that briefest of hesitations before he had decided what was safest to call her. She did not know if it was the uniform, or the wild hair quickly braided back again, or some sort of recognition. She could not hope for the last, of couse, and of course she was not now the Queen From Beyond the Sea, or any other kind of tsaritsa here in this land, not unless Viy fulfilled what he had once threatened or promised.

She was only ever the woman who she might have been had she never seen the birds, if no birds had ever sung on the branches in the trees. Except if she was only that, she would not have walked her story's groove into the world, would not remember the things she had been told to forget at the behest of a tsar, a rifle, a silver star. "No, no, it seems you have things all in order here, yes?"

The posters of happy, smiling comrades on the walls, the silvered reflections of the country of Life, of a world within an egg. Wheat and metal and a red reflected in the scarf hidden beneath the breast of her uniform. No shushing here, what secrets could an Ivan have to hide, after all?

The silence had grown long and sticky in the evening air. Marya nodded to him, abstracted. "I should leave you to your evening. I'm sure you must have a good wife to get back to."

She turned on her heel and left the golden-haired man looking after her in bewilderment.

-

 _My half-closed eyes over your young bride's shoulder_  
_Will meet your eyes just once and then no more._

-

"Comrade Bessmertny." A formal greeting, a handshake, all right and proper, the daylight pouring in through the windows.

Marya had gotten so close, in the night, had let her feet fall into the grooves of the world again and found a hole, broken boards lining it like teeth, dirt under her boots. There she found the smell of life deep underground, mushroom life and vinegar life, tenacity and uncertainty wrapped into one. She had broken into two women then, when her hand rested on the creaking, rotten wood of the former floor: the one who would find only dry bones and silver shadows, and the one who cracked the darkness open like an egg and found herself again, to end where she had begun. She did not know which woman she was more afraid of.

It felt to her as if she had stood there for an eternity, breathing in the space between the two women she could not reconcile. The chirp of a very early and hard-working bird broke her stillness again, and she looked to see the barest paling of the sky in the east, the fading stars.

Even though her feet merely walked, she felt as though she fled and flew away from her own story. Just for another night, just for a little while longer.

Except there was no place in all the world for her to go, no place where she could lay her finger aside of her nose and disappear through a crack between the country of Life and the country of Death, because there were no cracks in the world, and there was only ever this one anymore. There was no magic left in the world, it seemed, and a devil like her had no place in it.

Still she walked, coming to the deadfall they had crossed to come to this place, and then to the yarn laid out on the ground and the car, the old phlegmetic car, sitting there more patient than any horse. Laying a hand on the cold metal of the hood, she pondered just getting in, driving as far as her ration of gas would allow, make up some story about Comrade Ushanka--but no, that was just the problem, wasn't it? The story had its claws in her, sunken into her bones. The once-red thread lay dusty and drained of color on the ground, and Marya felt the pulse at her sternum, right between her ribs, and knew that that was where all of the color had gone.

Her feet turned back, back, always back, falling into the groove, walking Skorohodnaya Road again and again, always again. The town woke slowly, water being pumped, shutters being opened, as the sun rose just as dusty as the day before and Marya let her feet carry her to the house, to the door, to the sturdy wood shut against the night like a charm. She did not kneel this time, having fallen from no tree, but knocked firmly.

The man who answered the door looked enough like her tsar, her husband, that she could not help the catch in her breath. But no, it was not him, no stars peeked from his thick black hair, no gaze like a worshipper. She knew that, if she could feel it, he would still have no death hidden in his breastbone, but for entirely different reasons here and now. She had introduced herself, shaken his hand, and Yelena had appeared in the door behind him, smiling at this strange officer who had returned so quickly after having flown off the previous day.

Marya made a game of it, kvass and conversation (or what passed for it), seeing how carefully she could tread around the edges of memories and story like she used to tread around the traces of silver light that marked the borders. It was so much more difficult than she ever remembered it being. But she was always good at games and no matter how old and heavy her bones felt, she could play more than passably. At the end of it, she feels a little bad after startling Yelena with her rasping laugh (and when did her laugh start to sound so much like a crow's?), but leaves and walks out to see where the thread of her story will take her now.

-

 _It's not too late, you can still look back_  
at the red towers of your native city,  
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,  
at the empty windows set in the tall house

-

She moves through the terrible ghost that is pretending to be her city, more and more dust clinging to her, cataloging the faces she passes, peering at the dress in the shop window today, silver and gunmetal gray. Marya Morevna walks and tries to fit her feet to her new story. She walked herself into this world, and it was making room for her again, the way it had with a silver brush and a china cup and a series of steps from one curtain to another. 

It is in a door across from the house of the Yelena that the Tsaritsa of the Length of an Hour stands, her shape bent as a branch, as dark and terrifying and entrancing as ever. Marya faces her, expects to feel that old twist of fear, for the weak drink and biscuits to come back up and decorate the dusty street and her own dusty boots. But it does not come, even as she gazes at her old teacher, her old enemy, and, she supposes, her sister-in-law, in some roundabout way. Yet there is another girl she might have been, even after the birds, to have learned at the widow's knee as the daughter of bad luck, a tsarevna before her own bird-husband had fallen from the tree. A Marya was not an assured part of the story until she had walked her way into it, and Likho had been one of those first steps, as much as the steps behind the stove or to open the door. "I did not think you would be here," Marya finally finds her voice.

"Oh?" Likho's voice is not what it once was, and Marya understands what she said to the girl of twelve mothers all those lifetimes ago. "Where else would I be? Our brother welcomed me into his kingdom just as easily as anyone, and there were so many already here because they had called me."

That is true enough, she supposes, inclining her head a little. The two deposed tsaritsas look at each other for a long, long moment, short as an hour, as long as a spring. Likho is the one to break the silence with a laugh that doesn't shatter anything, and turns away, bending over a severe little peddler's cart Marya hadn't noticed until just then. "Well, that's just how life is, isn't it, comrade?"

Slowly she pushes the cart down Skorohodnaya road, creaking voice like a crow, cawing about her wares. The doorway she was in stands open, and empty, curiously so. Marya lifts her head, traces the tall windows in the tall house and half expects to see a girl in the second-floor window with black hair and a blue dress. But no, there is only this first floor with its curiously tall windows, papered over in lieu of glass, printed red stars and green branches fading slowly. The sharp scent of unripe apples comes on a breeze from behind the house as Marya goes inside the house where the ghosts of twelve mothers and a komityet of domovoi do not wait for her.

-

 _No-one was more cherished, no-one tortured_  
_Me more, not_  
_Even the one who betrayed me to torture,_  
_Not even the one who caressed me and forgot._

-

Darkness settles like a bird coming home to roost as Marya rouses herself from a sleep long-delayed. She had been so tired that she had simply laid down and gone to sleep on the bare tiles with their faded brown roses. She seems to recall that they were once pink, but it seems like a memory from a dream in another lifetime. Her knees pop, every joint aches, but she pushes herself up still, glancing at the unlit stove, the darkness outside the windows. 

The door still stands open where she left it, a breeze blowing the dust inside. She doesn't close it when she leaves, stepping down into the dirt and turning her steps to those teeth in the darkness, where she had hesitated before. There is no hesitation now as she steps to the edge, dangles her feet down into the space that reminds her of a great gaping wound. Slowly, but with steady deliberateness, her fingers unlace her boots, placing one, then the other, next to her on what's left of the floor in the ruin and wreckage of this building. A moment to breathe in the scents--slow-growing vegetable love, the embrace of roots on mildewed pages, fungus and fertile soil--then she slides down into the great gaping maw.

She lands harsher than she meant to, aches and pains shooting up to end in a flare of pain and a throbbing from the scar just under her eye. As dark as it was up above, it is even more so down here, and her eyes take a moment to adjust as she stands. The earth is cold, almost frozen under her feet as the little light there is, like stars peering through down to earth at dusk, lets her begin to pick out the details. She walks forward, each step deliberate, quiet against the earth, fitting neatly. 

There, the table, there, the chair, bone-white (and who would tell if it was beech-wood or bone?), a tatter of tapestry strewn along the floor. She kneels to touch the fabric and parts of it fray to dust, the eyes of the peacock's tail winking out. She turns away, reaches out for the chair, half expecting it to disintegrate before her eyes as well, but no, it is here and it is sturdy and the backs of her own knuckles turn nearly the same color as she grips it. 

A noise startles her out of her reverie and there he is, kneeling, with starlight winking from his black hair, one knee in the cold earth, hands spread beneath him. A long, still moment, and he rises in the shape she has so long known, and speaks her name.

-

 _I cannot tell if the day_  
_is ending, or the world, or if_  
_the secret of secrets is inside me again._

-

He cannot tell her why he remembers her, why it feels so familiar to bind his wrists in the inky fall of her hair, bury his face in it, and Marya can tell all that and more in the little stutters of his movements, the hitch of his breath as he studies her. But she holds him fast and does not let him fly from this reunion and reawakening.

As she touches the place in his jaw where she knows his will lies, and the place in his chest where his death would live, she smiles. She thinks to speak but the words fly away like blown snow. Instead, she kisses him, and begins to wear the next groove into the world with sweetness on her tongue and the pinpricks of memory like diamonds against her spine.

**Author's Note:**

> All poetry excerpts are from various translations of various poems of Anna Akhmatova, long one of my favorite poets, and quoted throughout the original novel. 
> 
> I tried my best with the words that I had in me, and I hope that you get at least some enjoyment out of them. May your Yuletide be filled with light.


End file.
